The Dark Knight took me by surprise because I really wasn’t expecting to like it. I’ve got a weakness for the funny Batman and Michael Keaton’s 1989 version was plenty dark enough for me. I didn’t think anyone could improve on Jack Nicholson’s Joker, and didn’t see why they should bother trying. I don’t like creepy clowns, and the fact that Heath Ledger died while making the film, perhaps because he was so disturbed by the psychopathic character he played, only added to the creepiness. The Dark KNight sounded like an evening of unredemptive cynical ugliness, with a few boring action scenes thrown in, and I didn’t see why I should waste a beautiful summer evening in an overly air conditioned theater watching it.
I still probably would have preferred to be outside in the warm summer air. But apart from that, The Dark Knight had far more depth, on various levels, than I expected. Heath Ledger’s acting was indeed a tour de force but somehow not as nightmare-inducing creepy as I anticipated, perhaps because he wasn’t the main character.
No one truly is the main character. Even Batman seems peripheral at times. There’s a conflict between two types of heroes –Harvey Dent, the traditional guy in the white hat hero, with the most amazingly jutting jaw I’ve ever seen, and Batman, the angst-ridden anti-hero. There’s a traditional enemy–the Mafia. But then the Joker blurs the picture, and the Joker is a terrorist enemy: a pure agent of chaos. Chaos has no rules and it has no morals. What we see in the Dark Knight is the effect of chaos on a society that does not understand it and cannot fight it.
When Harvey Dent’s girlfriend is killed he can’t cope with the existence of random evil and heads on over to the dark side himself. Batman, already corrupted, is able to cope with a more nuanced word and accept the presence of random evil, even as he continues to fight it. Yet he makes the (perhaps condescending) decision at the end of the movie to “give the people the hero they want” by preserving the reputation of Harvey Dent. Dent, as a heroic martyr must, is killed off at the end. But As the “hero they need” Batman (and of course the JOker) stays alive to fight another day, and yes, I’m sure, make another movie.
To me, the most interesting scene involved none of these characters. Rather, it involved groups in two boats fleeing terror-struck Gotham. One ship was filled with convicts; the other with ordinary people. The Joker, playing one of his amoral games, leave both boatloads in possession of a remote capable of blowing the other boat up. He tells them that if they blow the other boat up he will spare their lives, but if they let the folks in the other boat live then he will blow both boats up at midnight. Both boatloads, ultimately, disprove the Joker’s cynical assumptions about human nature and toss the remotes into the sea. And, guess what? Batman intervenes and no one gets blown up.
Maybe all leader/heroes are a sham, and the moral is to rely on our own flawed humanity. Certainly anyone who believes in clear good/evil dichotomies is setting themselve up for disillusion. And just as sequel follows sequel, chaos is an inevitable component of the universe.
Or maybe I just turned the cynical violent action movie I didn’t want into the heavy philosophical statement on the contemporary world that I needed.
